Before the iPod playlist, there was the pause button

In the early and mid-1980s before I got my hands on proper DJ’ing equipment or even understood properly that it was something that I wanted to do, I had already thought about ‘set’ programming. I used to take recordings from different sources such as pirate radio, tape recordings of reedits by London DJ Foggy and others as well as Streetsounds compilations to do mixtapes edited with the pause button on a cassette recorder.

I later did a little bit of tape splicing on a 1960s Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder using a tape splicing kit from Tandy. However with my limited resources this was an overly expensive process at the time.

Bill Brewster (of DJ History fame) has shared some of his pause button edited mix tapes from the 1980s for your dilection. Sometimes it helps to put things in perspective when you realise that there was a time before the iPod. Whilst the musical trip down memory lane was great today’s iTunes playlists are so much better; but I won’t be giving up my Technics SL-1200s any time soon.